Pushing keyboard into the past

I like a good keyboard and really struggle even with the so so keyboard on my Treo 650.  However one of my friends can tap out messages pretty quickly without even looking at his phone number pad and many people have told me that most kids can do this really rapidly (although not mine – not enough allowance to text all the time 🙂 ).  This seems to be the first of many ways in which I really am being left behind by the youth of today and I need to start to think carefully about assumptions I make. 

This need for vigilance will probably become increasingly true when it comes to disruptive technologies like the keyboard alternatives that Microsoft has recently been showing off for small format devices.  I have tried software implementations of them and failed hopelessly to use them effectively,  but I can imagine that kids will soon be using them to enter text as fast as I can on my full sized keyboard!